Jump to content

luke viia

Knob Twiddlers
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    6,761

  • Joined

  • Days Won

    5

 Content Type 

Posts posted by luke viia

    Your pointless thoughts & observations

    in General Banter

    Posted

    realized I'm a bit too close to making a point to be posting in this thread - so here's a quite literally aimless/pointless observation in the same vein: 

    it's surreal to shift my gaze between the moon and these struggling humans. the meaning of the moment shifts drastically depending on where I focus; not even a slight head movement required for a full philosophical replacement

    Your pointless thoughts & observations

    in General Banter

    Posted · Edited by luke viia

    On 7/7/2023 at 1:23 AM, iococoi said:

    may be you could alert one of those services about the situation or ask for guidance? ...any food banks in your area, which can help you out? 

    yar, I have had to call the services (one of which is 911, for better or worse) to get help for some of these people. one lady was hallucinating so bad she was repeatedly punching herself in the head while screaming "I don't fucking care" and then passing out on the hot sidewalk (kicking her legs spasmodically - I don't like this comparison, but the closest thing I can think of is the way dogs kick when they have nightmares). called 911 that time so that they knew she was in distress and to treat it as a mental health issue (I wasn't the first caller). didn't dare tell dispatch that she was black, even though they directly asked. I have a friend that works at the city's housing authority and she is a great resource for knowing who to call, as well as just a fantastically compassionate person generally. very grateful for that. there are food banks around, but they all have different requirements and they don't really have ready-to-eat foodstuffs, so idk if that'd help the homeless much... also most of them don't ask for food, just that one particular woman.

    tonight there's a guy out there swaying in place making vroom-vroom sounds and raising his heels like he's on a motorcycle. maybe reliving glory days, idk. he scared a black cat away from the bus stop, causing it to cross my path instead. thanks buddy. he's just left now, having waddled away looking like Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse. Was listening to this on my headphones as I watched him. 

    edit: just gonna add how weird it is to watch people walk past the man I described as if he doesn't exist, like literally just not even noticing. that said, I didn't approach him either; I don't think there was anything I could do to help this guy, he was truly in his own world, so I kinda get it...

    guess I'll also add I had dinner with some old (as in, both former & elderly) neighbors tonight and they had friends over - some middle aged couple from Portland. I brought up homelessness quietly at one corner of the table (because it was relevant to the person I was speaking to) and the wife of the couple heard me and quickly changed the subject; minutes later she told a story about their house (which is now worth "well over $1 million" apparently) and how a homeless man fell asleep one night outside "OUR flower bed!" ... I could have puked. ugh. 

    • Like 1

    The Space Thread

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology

    "We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," explained Loeb, "They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."

    An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements. They are sub-millimeter in size. The crew found 50 of them in total.

    "It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," added Loeb, "We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization or some technological gadget."

     

    tldr: prof says aliens made marbles of our planet and threw them at us really hard, rude

    • Haha 4
    • Facepalm 1

    Your pointless thoughts & observations

    in General Banter

    Posted

    my heart keeps breaking for the homeless folks that live on my block. some of them I only see once, but there's one woman that sleeps under the awning of a hair salon across the street and I've given her a pillow a few times now (she kindly returns it to my stoop in the morning) and she always asks for food, and I do what I can to oblige, but I'm broke too, eating rice and noodles and whatever just to get by. I couldn't get her what she wanted tonight but she accepted what I had, and managed to smile when I said goodnight. god, I feel like crying. people pass my place all the time just straight mean-mugging not only the homeless people but me as well, and I just don't get it. I don't know how to help. there are some basic services around here for people in distress, but not nearly enough. I'm so tired. 

    • Sad 2

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted · Edited by luke viia

    decided to read Industrial Society & Its Future by Mr. Unicycle himself. It's....okay? Not very well-reasoned, but his whole thing about needing effort-based goals in our lives and how modern society foils that (except by giving us a desire for "surrogate goals") and cannot be reformed is interesting. I'm not done with it yet, but idk. He trashes "leftists" repeatedly but then also throws in a paragraph starting with "The conservatives are fools." So, you know, both sides.

    also reading some Nietzsche for the first time in my life (I once heard that Nietzsche was a "young man's philosophy" so naturally waited until my late 30s to read him, being an iconoclastic stable genius myself). Started with Human, All Too Human, which felt like a good introduction, and I bookmarked quite a few pages, but there was plenty to dislike. I'm about halfway through Thus Spake Zarathustra now and it's a slog, ngl. I can see why it's hailed as a literary achievement, but again I disagree with most of what he's saying, so yeah. Trying to reserve judgment until I get through some more of his stuff, but idk how much time I want to spend with the guy. Might get through Beyond Good & Evil and call it quits. 

    also recently read: Emmanuel Swedenborg's Divine Love & Wisdom, which was equal parts insane and profound; a few books on Platonic metaphysics by Tim Addey, who follows Proclus' teachings - not easy stuff, but I do love neoplatonism; and Crime & Punishment, which is absolutely a fantastic novel. And it's what made me pick up Nietzsche, though Dostoevsky is 1000% better, fairer, and clearer in his (well, Raskolnikov's) philosophy.

     

    edit: finished Kaczynski's essay and it was, unsurprisingly, not great. pretty much what you'd expect... cracked luddite revolutionary manifesto. sadly not hard to understand his frustration with modern society, though. 

    • Like 1

    stupid first world problems you're dealing with

    in General Banter

    Posted

    On 7/3/2023 at 1:07 PM, cruising for burgers said:

    my advice: @luke viia

    don't go for intellectual likeness... it's cool to know that you probably have nothing in common because what you admire in the beginning of a relationship just ends up getting tiresome after a while... just like those little habits that you have that they/you find funny in the beginning but later on they're annoying af... you've seen it in the movies and probs experienced it already... the most fun I had with a girlfriend we had close to nothing in common... and the common just grew up...

    oh and fucking nostalgia, when you break up (if you do eventually) you'll have so much things that are gonna remind you of they...

    ah I didn't really mean intellectual likeness, did a bad job explaining myself in that post, but I get what you mean. I was trying to describe a similar outlook on life in general. I know what I'm after. :cat: best wishes to all the watmm lovers out there

    • Thanks 1

    posh beers and ales and stuff thread

    in General Banter

    Posted · Edited by luke viia

    IMG_20230705_003018674.thumb.jpg.fd1ce5e15c5f6d014dd6f0da3c0c3b43.jpg

    love this stuff, pretty spendy generally but it goes on steep sales occasionally and I'm there for it. strong, not too sweet, giraffe looks appropriately zooted, would recommend

     

    IMG_20230705_002950362.thumb.jpg.813556d4419e92ab0a868078d7415e59.jpg

    pretty much the opposite of a posh ale but it's the same price as PBR and goes down even easier, made in Portland, skips the hangover, overall A+ piss in my book

    • Like 2

    stupid first world problems you're dealing with

    in General Banter

    Posted

    the track saw rail I use at work is slipping roughly 1/8" over a ten foot span and it is REALLY irritating. the anti slip pad seems fine and I think it's doing this because the boards I have to trim are slightly cupped/warped, which is also a giant pain in the ass since I can't clamp any of it bc of the type of cuts I'm doing, and fixing the boards themselves isn't an option bc our table planer is out of commission and I'm the one that's supposed to fix it, but I've never actually used this somewhat ancient planer nor have I ever replaced a fancy planer's cutter head and I'll probably kill someone (me) if I try it unsupervised. my boss has never replaced the head on this thing either, so he's no help, and the only mechanically inclined guy I have access to is known to move way too fast, lose things, force parts into position etc. ffs

    1/8"

    • Big Brain 1

    AI - The artificial intelligence thread

    in General Banter

    Posted

    psychology today puts out a lot of trash articles, but this one is good: 

    On Superfluous People

    Quote

    As if to purposely provoke like a novel kind of adversary, author Yuval Noah Harari has said that "The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people once we have highly intelligent, non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?" The implication is immediate: if humans aren’t economically viable, they are, ipso facto, superfluous.

     

    • Like 1

    stupid first world problems you're dealing with

    in General Banter

    Posted · Edited by luke viia

    22 minutes ago, zero said:

    I know you were being sarcastic, but on a serious note - my wife and I's music tastes are not what got the flame started many years ago. before her, I used to think I had a type, which meant the person I thought I'd end up with should be knowledgeable of the same social scene, cultural references, inside jokes, etc. but after riding the marriage wave for a minute now, I'd say it's best to look at the human elements of the other person, rather than anything more surface level - like music/art tastes. like does this person seem happy, carefree, good-natured...doesn't complain about things, and instead can easily go with the flow. personality characteristics like this in a person that are genuine, are the things that imo naturally keep one human attached to another human long term. has worked for me so far. good luck with finding that. 

    for sure. I've only dated a few people that had music tastes similar to mine, and while the old mix CDs from those relationships are still some of the most vivid and amazing emotional memory-banks I possess, similar tastes in cultural artifacts alone will definitely not sustain a happy relationship. the class of traits you listed are indeed more important. I do think, though, that a similar way of seeing / moving through the world, of searching, of humor, a similar way of hoping to explore existence and grow into it, is necessary (for me anyway idk) - so that both people can not only love each other face to face, but walk together shoulder to shoulder. 

    • Like 2

    stupid first world problems you're dealing with

    in General Banter

    Posted

    14 hours ago, exitonly said:

    yeah just ask a bunch of questions and then come up with more questions based on the answers. then also be nice

    that's been the strategy. tbh not really feeling a connection, she's super nice and all, and quite pretty, but I'd rather just be friends. she probably feels the same way; totally cool with that. 

    to be clear I didn't ask about aphex lol, I'm not that dense. though i did ask what kind of music she enjoys (if she's going to any fun concerts this summer, etc), and she seems to be a music by proxy type person. not like us, the intellectual mind dancers, the machine whisperers, the humble filter sweepers, the patch cord dreamers. an insurmountable gap, really. 

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.